Making shell history magical with Atuin (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Launch week! New features and products all week long (so get comfy)! Tune in to Sentry’s YouTube and Discord daily at 9am PT to hear the latest scoop. Too busy? No problem - enter your email address to receive all the announcements (and win swag along the way). Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
• Synadia – Take NATS to the next level via a global, multi-cloud, multi-geo and extensible service, fully managed by Synadia. They take care of all the infrastructure, management, monitoring, and maintenance for you so you can focus on building exceptional distributed applications.
• imgproxy – imgproxy is open source an optimizes images for the web on the fly. It makes websites and apps blazing fast while saving storage and SaaS costs. It uses the world’s fastest image processing library under the hood — libvips. It is screaming fast and has a tiny memory footprint.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Ellie Huxtable – Website, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Atuin
• Efficient Linux at the CLI with Daniel J. Barrett (Changelog Interviews #547)
• Here’s how to quickly navigate your shell’s history of commands
• RVM and Ruby Version Managment with Michal Papis (Changelog Interviews #102)
• thoughtbot/rcm: rc file (dotfile) management
• ivaaaan/smug: Session manager and task runner for tmux
• RVM
• Wayne Seguin
• RVM and BDSM (Changelog Interviews #66)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Capitole

1. Welcome to The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:01:05)

https://sentry.io/

3. Start the show! (00:04:49)

4. Welcoming Ellie (00:05:07)

5. An intro to Atuin (00:06:25)

https://atuin.sh

6. The sync service (00:10:23)

7. Sync isn't required (00:12:15)

8. Why Ellie likes Rust (00:12:48)

9. How she got the word out (00:14:59)

10. How big of a problem is this? (00:16:52)

11. autin stats (00:21:19)

12. Adam's trust issues (00:24:56)

13. Sponsor: Synadia (00:29:56)

https://www.synadia.com/changelog

14. Quitting her day job (00:35:08)

15. RVM & Wayne Seguin (00:38:54)

16. Syncing aliases (00:42:27)

17. Ellie's homelab (00:47:45)

18. Sponsor: imgproxy (00:48:31)

https://imgproxy.net/

19. More on quitting (00:52:00)

20. Building the right thing (00:55:20)

21. Ellie's motorbike (00:55:58)

22. The big dream (00:57:11)

23. Working with Warp (00:57:58)

24. On raising money (01:00:27)

25. About the name (01:02:22)

26. How can we help? (01:04:25)

27. Adam's UX advice (01:05:07)

28. Thanks Ellie! (01:09:06)

29. Up next (01:09:29)